GPT-4.5 is here, and OpenAI’s newest generative AI model is bigger and more compute-intensive than ever—it’s supposedly also better at understanding what ChatGPT users mean with their prompts. Users who want to be part of the first wave to try GPT-4.5, labeled as a research preview, will be required to pay for OpenAI’s $200-a-month ChatGPT Pro subscription.

Prior to this launch, 2025 has already been filled with new AI model releases. Anthropic recently put out a hybrid reasoning model for its Claude chatbot. Before that, Chinese researchers at DeepSeek rocked Silicon Valley with their release of a powerful model trained on a tiny budget, prompting OpenAI to drop a “mini” version of its reasoning model a month ago.

Alongside these new releases, OpenAI promised to invest billions into building the AI infrastructure required to fuel more massive models. And GPT-4.5 is a reiteration of this current strategy from the startup: Bigger is better.

ChatGPT 4.5 is in stark contrast to other recent AI innovations, like DeepSeek’s R1, that attempted to match the performance of a frontier model with as few resources as possible. OpenAI still sees a strong path forward through scaling its models. According to researchers who worked on GPT-4.5, this kind of maximalist mindset to model development has captured more of the nuances of human emotions and interactions.